Each and every year the web development industry is consumed by a bunch of “buzzwords” and new technology crazes. The web is a dynamic place, and it requires people who work in the industry to be constantly switched on, or risk falling behind.

NodeJS

NodeJS has exploded since 2012, with this year definitely being the most widespread for growth so far.

And it’s showing no sign of slowing down. NodeJS is being utilized in all sorts of environments, from full stack web software like Ghost, to developer friendly tools like Grunt.

As the web undoubtedly grows and takes a larger market share on desktop and mobile software, NodeJS, and Javascript in general is bound to follow.

Shadow DOM

The Shadow DOM is becoming a growing influence on many technology leading developers and software. Essentially a subset of web components, the Shadow DOM will definitely grow in popularity over 2015, and will probably work it’s way to being a standard component of developing for the web.

Page speed and encryption

2014 has been labelled by many in the community as the year for “mobile-first” web development, due to the vast increases of mobile device usage and traffic on the web.

As more and more developers get familiar with mobile-first development techniques, the next obvious place to improve is page loading speed and security.

Big mobile web traffic means a whole bunch of data, of which, a lot is private information.

Google has already started encouraging webmasters to utilize SSL encryption on their websites, or face penalization on search rankings.

Javascript in general

Hate developing javascript? Sorry… too bad.

Javascript is here to stay. With the combination of NodeJS and other popular frameworks suchs as AngularJS and EmberJS, javascript and it’s influence on the web industry will be fighting as hard as ever.

To top it off, javascript ECMAScript version 6 is due to be released in June 2015.

SVG and vector graphics on the web

As browser support grows, inevitably, the use of more modern features like SVG / vector graphics on the web will take off.

Images will slowly be phased out for logos, advertisements, and other media that doesn’t require bloated image files and formats.